Looking ahead: previewing the concepts: Now in this internet age the marketing activities are highly influenced by the internet and computer information systems. The environment of marketing has become more sophisticated and competitive due to the use of the internet as a competitive weapon by companies worldwide. Let’s know more about the marketing environment.
This is the new era where traditional factors of the environment also exist. At the time of preparing the marketing mix or formulating the strategy, the company as a whole should keep the impact of the environment in their mind.
For the simplicity of the analysis, this total environment is divided into two distinct groups, micro, and macro environment. On one side there is a solid influence of factors like customers, suppliers, intermediaries, competitors, public, etc and on the other hand, economic, cultural, political, natural, and technological forces influence the marketing decision making.
In combination, these are the elements of the marketing environment that dictate the activities in the field of marketing. In the capsules given below and above show how Unilever ovulates and adjusts marketing.
In the capsules given below and above show how Unilever evaluates and adjusts with its marketing environmental forces. It can be seen from the capsules that the clear and dedicated interaction with the macro-environmental forces help Unilever to be strong internally to perform their takes in a better way.
On the other hand, the perfect collaboration with the macro forces leads Unilever to become the leader in the world arena. Unilever has understood the environmental forces that pushed it to the apex.
We know that nowadays customer relationship management is the vital point in the total marketing process and also for the continuous growth of the organization. But this is not everything in the total process.
Rather there are some other factors that also dictate the marketing activities. In fact, the combination of those factors is the marketing environment. A company’s marketing environment consists of the actors and forces outside marketing that affect marketing management’s ability to build and maintain successful relationships with target customers. The marketing environment offers both opportunities and threats.
For example, an alliance with the supplier and distributor may help an organization to get a competitive edge over its rivals. On the other hand entry of many competitors poses threat to the organization as some of their customers may shift to a new seller. The company’s task should be to watch continuously the changes in the environment.
For example, a change in government regulation may bring an opportunity to make more business thus more profit. Again a change in the perception of the employees towards job satisfaction may create a problem in the operation of the organization.
The problem is that competitors will try to hit an organization by finding their weak points. To be safe, the organizations perform an analysis called SWOT analysis. Besides, organizations need to be aware of the marketing environment.
Let us proceed further with an example, the super shop concepts in Dhaka city. The literature meaning of Super shop is a large shop selling food, drink, household goods, etc. people choose what they want from the shelves and pay for them as they leave.
Basically, a super shop is a one-floor large area consisting of the daily goods bought by households.
The daily goods include all the fast-moving consumer goods like households, groceries, stationeries, cosmetics, etc. above all, a supermarket provides a customer with the right products at the right weight and quality. These also include fresh meat, fruits, vegetables to frozen even frozen foodstuff.
The concept of a super shop is new in Bangladesh. But today, with the current shopping practices prevailing, the need for a real supermarket has become a necessity for the following reasons:
- To improve the shopping facilities currently available
- To offer shoppers a unique shopping experience
- For the convenient location in central areas
- Offer a clean and friendly environment with a wide range of products at affordable prices.
- It became the primary channel for the distribution of foods and other household effects to the consumers.
In Bangladesh, daily consumables include fresh, raw, and processed supplies in the form of fruits, vegetables, rice, meat, fish, poultry, spices, and other edible items. The retailing sector of this industry is unorganized, and much small retailing involving a number of layers of middlemen occur.
More notably, most forms of such selling occur at Kacha Bazaars in and around localities in an unhygienic environment and non-systematic manner. In a nutshell, the present status of the goods market can be listed out as follows:
Shoppers are quite dissatisfied with the present system of bazaars, corner grocery shops, and general stores, present environment is inconvenient, dirty, and unhygienic, goods are of questionable quality, supply is not stable, erratic pricing, the existing level of service is not acceptable to most customers, inefficient supply chain dominated by middlemen increases prices, the services rendered are often unpredictable and seldom satisfactory, consumers want a shop with a full range of grocery items so that they do not have to hop around from shop to shop.
From the above-mentioned problems, Rahimafrooz has entered into a new area of business. Rahimafrooz has set up a chain of world-class supermarkets in Bangladesh. Each store will have a total floor space of 7,000 sqft offering 10,000 variety of products from fresh vegetables to meat to dry and canned food to toiletry products. The first store opened in July 2001, at Rifles Square in Dhanmondi. The chain of superstores would come under Rahimafrooz Superstores Ltd. (RSL) udder the Rahimafrooz group of companies.
This will be the first of its kind in the country and will change the way Bangladeshi people shop. After Sri Lanka, Bangladesh would be the second country in the sub-continent with organized fresh produce markets on such a large scale.
Since the concept of superstores is new to Bangladesh, RSL would develop the concept with the help of the brand name AGORA which is a Greek word meaning a meeting place. With the strong quality and reliability image of Rahimafrooz behind Agora, it would develop to be the first-ever branded chain of supermarkets in Bangladesh.
The need of the potential consumer, supplier’s availability, mode of competition, government’s regulations, change in the purchasing power of the local citizens, shifting in the view of the consumers towards shopping, use of technology, in fact, encouraged the Rahimafrooz Ltd to start such a good venture and they are successful in their initiatives.
The main reason behind their success is, of course, the evaluation of their marketing environment. Now the super shop concept is a hot cake in Dhaka city but still, the brand Agora is used as synonymous with a super shop.
The marketing environment surrounds and impacts on the organization. There are three key perspectives on the marketing environment, namely the ‘macro-environment, the micro-environment, and the internal environment.
The microenvironment is the closest one to the organization. The actors close to the company that affects its ability to serve its customers is called microenvironment. It influences the organization directly.
It includes suppliers that deal directly or indirectly, consumers and customers, and other local stakeholders. Micro tends to suggest small, but this can be misleading. In this context, micro describes the relationship between firms and the driveline forces that control this relationship. It is a more local relationship, and the firm may exercise a degree of influence.
The Macro-environment includes all factors that can influence an organization, but that is out of their direct control. A company does not generally influence any laws (although it is accepted that they could lobby or be part of aggressive competition and rivalry in a market. Globalization means that there is always the threat of substitute products and new entrants.
The wider environment is also ever-changing, and the marketer needs to compensate for changes in culture, politics, economics, and technology.
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I learned a new topic, and you explain it well.